Page 160 - Únete. Join us (Bienal de Venecia, 57 edición)

4 See: Fredric Jameson,
Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions, London: Verso, 2005.
5 A 1958 French film.
then the possibilities for political articulation lie in gatherings – whether for protest, celebration, solidarity, or common interest – where multitudes constitute themselves into true citizenry. The deixis in ¡Únete! Join Us! is addressed to the second person singular, in an offering that manages to pierce through the structural impossibility of utopia,4 so that participants may partake in what is to come. In whatever the future may be.
Display
“Tout communique!”
— Mme. Arpel in Tati’s Mon oncle5
Jordi Colomer belongs to the generation of artists that helped establish the field of contemporary art in Spain. Since the late 1980s his work was mostly focused on sculpture. Like other Spanish artists whose formative years coincided with the early period of the new democratic, post-Franco regime, he constructed a genealogy of his own: At one level he engaged in dialogue with historical precedents such as Italian Arte Povera, Marcel Broodthaers’ Belgian conceptualism, Bruce Nauman’s performances, or Joan Brossa’s visual poetry and theatre; at another level, he also kept track of contemporary developments such as Tony Cragg’s or Bill Woodrow’s new British sculpture, or the work of singular figures such as Franz West or Juan Muñoz. During this period he evolved beyond object-oriented sculpture by gradually shifting to architectural scales, with inhabitable constructions that included references to the world of the theatre and its concomitant apparatuses. In the critical vocabularies flourishing in Spain in the 1990s, the hangover from the democratic success unleashed by trans-avant-garde painting’s market boom generated a kind of self-referential art, where theatricality became the key notion in a strategy aimed at restoring complexity to the relationship between social groups and the cultural sphere: to turn audiences into actors or participants that might amplify art’s impact upon the real.
In recent years – in collaborative projects where different groups feature in his works as non-professional actors or occasional performers – the above-mentioned approach has allowed Colomer to probe the boundaries of urban public space as fiction or representation. The recurring question shaping his engagement
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¡ÚNETE! JOIN US! JORDI COLOMER